Harry

“The war doesn't end as long as you live, the main thing is standing on your own two feet.”
― Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz

“Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.”
― Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900

“Behind wire partitions, each with a number fixed on it, were enthroned the almost immobile women, priestesses of the venal Ceres, market women of all fruit of field and tree, of all edible fowl, fish and mammals, procuresses, inviolable wool-clad colossi who communicated among themselves from one booth to another, whether with a flash of their great buttons, with a slap on the apron or with a bosom-swelling sigh. Did it not seethe, bubble and swell under their skirts, was this not the truly fertile ground? Did not a market god himself cast his wares into their laps: berries, shellfish, mushrooms, lumps of meat and cabbage, cohabiting unseen with those who gave themselves to him, while they, leaning against barrels or with their scales slack-chained between their knees, surveyed languidly and mutely the lines of housewives laden with bags and shopping nets who tried with difficulty to steer their broods before them through the slick, stinking passages.”
― Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900

“Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.”
― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding